MEASURE UPON MEASURE – SEPARATION – THE RESTORATION OF GOD - Part 3
CHAPTER 2 - THE SECOND CONSEQUENCE
In the previous two messages we studied the first consequence to come from the disobedience of Adam and Eve. That was GUILT and associated SHAME. In the Garden of Eden SERENITY was RUINED when the RESULTS OF SIN manifested themselves. The Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to address all those consequences of sin to restore the sinner into a more glorious position than our earthly fore parents ever had. That was the SAVIOUR’S ROAD.
We now progress to the second consequence of the fall resulting from the deliberate disobedience of man and it is found in {{Genesis 3:8: “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”}}
FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD IN THE GARDEN
There was a time when a beautiful creation existed but the presence of man in it was yet unknown. Then one day God took of the elements of the dust and from them fashioned a sinless man, perfect in his manhood, completely responsive in his worship of the Creator, desirous of beautiful communion but at the same time, an agent of free will. It would not be inconceivable to believe that the Personal Presence of God was the first and immediate comprehension of Adam after he became a living soul. God’s presence stood beside him and God instructed him and communed with him.
It would not be unreasonable to believe that it was God’s constant custom to commune in a Personal appearance with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. How the two individuals must have anticipated that afternoon fellowship closing each day, to share openly in that very special communion. Even when God was not literally present, there was still the unbroken, unspotted fellowship with the Lord God. There was not one cloud, not one mist, not one suggestion of any break in the closeness of communion with their Creator-God, or between the man and the woman themselves.
That was a relationship truly unique in the whole of human history this side of the rapture. The perfection of fellowship and the completeness of communion was their enjoyment in the garden, with one another, and with their Lord.
I did say just earlier, “it was God’s CONSTANT custom to commune in a Personal appearance with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day.” It was constant but it was not on-going. Sin destroyed that communion. For how long did God come down to fellowship with the two individuals?
There is no biblical indication how long that sinless relationship lasted, but I do have an idea. {{Genesis 1:27-28 God created man in His own image. In the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, “BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY, AND FILL THE EARTH and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”}}
God commanded procreation and there was nothing to prevent it, but Cain was conceived in sin; he was not sinless as his parents had once been, so we assume that fellowship in the cool of the evening lasted for only a very short period.
One of the names for Satan is Beelzeboul (sometimes written as Beelzebub) meaning “Lord of the flies”. I suppose we could say, “Lord of contamination,” for that is Satan’s purpose. It is amazing sometimes when I am preparing food and it might sit for less than a minute on a kitchen bench, that out of nowhere comes this horrible blowfly, whose aim is to contaminate and destroy what has been made/prepared/created. That is exactly Satan’s mission, to destroy and he attends to it very quickly.
The Sower sowed the good seed and in next to no time the devil planted his tares. A work for God is commenced and not long into it there is trouble, either internally or externally. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices. Another name for Satan is Apollyon, meaning destroyer. He sets out to destroy all that belongs to God. In their innocence, Adam and Eve were ignorant of Satan’s schemes.
THE SECOND CONSEQUENCE - SEPARATION
But sin entered, and numbered among the dreadful results was SEPARATION. The innocence of sweet communion was shattered. It is Serenity Ruined. They then had no desire to hurry into the presence of the Lord. That previous and precious relationship was now severed. From that point onwards, God and man have been separated by sin and indeed a mighty gulf exists. Man, armed with his conscience, determines his own way, and that way is ever downwards. He flees the presence of God. The light of God’s presence will expose his SEPARATION, so as creatures of the night, man avoids the revealing light of the presence of God.
Here in the wet tropics there are lots of cockroaches. Maybe your experience is that when you put on a light at night you may see them rush away to hide. Maybe you won’t admit to that because people don’t want others to know there might be a cockroach in the house. These filthy insects hate a revealing light, just like sinners. If a church minister is going to visit a house where the wife is saved, the unsaved husband clears off or hides away somewhere. Sinners hate the light of God’s exposure.
{{John 3:19-21 “This is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and MEN LOVED THE DARKNESS RATHER THAN THE LIGHT for their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and DOES NOT COME TO THE LIGHT LEST HIS DEEDS SHOULD BE EXPOSED, but he who practises the truth comes to the light that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”}}
SIN’S RESULTS
Not only is there now estrangement between God and man, but also between every member of the human race. Sin has brought separation and that has led to all manner of subsequent evils - ostracism, racial tensions, marital troubles, divorce, murders, wars, rejections, proud ambition, hateful arguments, abhorrent behaviour, deceitfulness and vindictive revenge. Terrible are these Sin’s Results.
We see the evidence inside the churches of Christendom; outside the churches; we see it in our parliaments; in the very street where we live. The feminist movement is one based on the philosophy of separation and discord. Militant “Gay rights” movements are into separation and division even though they like to use the word “inclusion”. If you agree with them they will include you, but if you disagree you get excluded. So much for the hypocrisy of inclusion. We could spend ages in citing further examples but those given will suffice. All these visual separations spring from the initial separation between God and man, and without the vertical aspect being addressed there is not much hope for the horizontal ones.
What a sorry state our first parents were in. Adam at least lived a long life, even though we know nothing of the life span of Eve. Every day they must have seen evidence of their folly in the world. They saw the fruit of separation being enacted, ever deeper and deeper entrenching itself in human behaviour, while all the time man became further and further separated from God until in Noah’s time we have the maturing of such terrible evil that God had to intervene in a decisive judgment. How appalling is the second consequence of sin.
How man has tried to cope with the problem of separation without ever wanting to acknowledge its cause, or its only true remedy. Today we have peace conferences when there is no true peace; there are behaviour management seminars often based on a humanistic philosophy often spawned by psychologists; numerous “race relations” meetings; there are groups to advise on marital problems.
Interwoven through all the sorrow of human experience there are psychologists, and therapists supposedly to help people in their difficulties, yet in the United States alone, over 70% of these professionals find it needful to visit their own analysts. The various bodies and approaches and strategies used are more than likely based solely on humanistic philosophies, and are no better than blindfolded people wandering lost in a forest on a moonless night.
The most drastic consequence of separation is its ultimate finality. That finality the bible teaches is in the lake of fire. All who die in this world are either in Christ or out of Christ. Those out of Christ will realise the awful reality of the fruit of their separation. They end in a Christless eternity where the Lord spoke of the gnashing of teeth and torment forever.
THE SAVIOUR’S ROAD
Separation is a problem man can not resolve. The good news is that the dilemma has been solved. In the first consequence of sin - guilt and shame - we saw how Jesus Christ, Himself, identified with that problem and the method is the very same here. How did He identify then with our separation?
In the first place He knew separation throughout His ministry on earth. His message was in the main rejected by those He came to dwell among, especially by the leaders of the nation, and the spiritual leaders in particular. The ostracism that resulted, and the rejection of Him and His message, was a form of separation because men of their own free will chose to reject the Son of God thereby separating themselves from Him. Sad as that was, it could not be compared with the greatest of all separation which was His alone to endure and totally unique.
We read of that in {{Matthew 27:45-46. “Now from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour, and about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?”}}
We notice here firstly that Jesus cried out in a loud voice. There are only seven recorded sayings of Jesus from the cross and just two of those are stated as being expressed in a loud voice. Loudness portrayed the significant intensity and importance of the utterances on the occasions they were used, and how deeply intense was the reason behind this one in verse 46! This is actually an agonising cry of frightful reality.
It comes from Psalm 22 which along with Psalm 69 mentioned earlier, form our most intimate look at the Saviour upon the cross. Both these psalms contain deep beseeching prayers in the midst of terrible physical and spiritual sufferings. Fervent prayer most certainly would have marked the hours of suffering and much in these psalms I believe would have literally been taken as the Lord’s silent prayers from the cross as both these psalms are very Messianic in character.
The quotation from Psalm 22 is an interesting one. {{“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? Far from my deliverance are the words of MY GROANING.”}} The NASB gives “roaring” as an alternate rendering for “groaning”. Why then did the Lord Jesus in Matthew 27:46 cry out with a loud voice, or “roaring” as the psalm would detail? The Lord Jesus Christ, as the magnificent second Person of the Godhead and the Divine Word, has always existed from the beginning, even before the beginning if we could probe John’s profound opening verse of his gospel.
Never in the history of the divine Trinity had there ever been a separation among the Persons of the Godhead. There had always been the most perfect union as the triune God. But there came a time when prophetically the Lord answered the call for man’s salvation. This selection from Hebrews 10:5-7 enlightens that response.
{{“Therefore, when He comes into the world, He says, “Sacrifice and offering You have not desired, but a body You have prepared for Me. In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come (In the roll of the book it is written of Me) to do Your will, O God.’ ”}}
Thus He came to do the Father’s will. Even in that coming there was no separation, but a still-continuing full communion in the Godhead. Then 33 years passed as a life lived perfectly in Israel.
Matthew records that at about the sixth hour and for the next three hours, darkness blackened the face of the land. In the section on guilt and shame we considered one aspect of that blackness there. Now we will explore it a little more. “He made Him to be sin for us.” The terrible suffering for sin was hidden from the sight of jeering and scornful men. Jesus identified with the consequences of our sin, here in particular with SEPARATION.
When He became sin for us (our sins having been laid upon Him), the Father turned away from the Son (or an action we are not aware of that mounted to being forsaken), and being forsaken on the cross, He suffered alone and entered the place of no standing where the raging billows of God’s wrath against sin swallowed Him up. That was the place of complete separation, the God-forsaken emptiness that the Lord had to endure for our salvation. We will never know what it meant for the Lord to enter that place, for the first and only time, to be separated from the communion within the Godhead.
If God blotted out the scene from before a race of sinful men, then I believe it will always be blotted out and never will we have any knowledge of the separation in the blackness that the Lord endured. It will never be for us to know. I suppose Elizabeth Clephane expressed it in another way in her hymn:
But none of the ransomed ever knew
How deep were the waters crossed;
Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through
‘Ere He found His sheep that was lost.
Yet another writer, L. G. Milner, stated it this way:
Yet onward still to go,
On to the cross;
Drink deep that cup of woe,
Of grief and loss.
All from You then did flee,
And on the accursed tree
God hid His face from Thee,
Truly alone!
Is it not to be marvelled at, that He cried out in the reality of being forsaken by God? Can we appreciate just a little, why He asked earlier in the garden for the cup to be removed from Him. The drinking of that cup in obedience to the Father’s will meant a period of separation of the deepest and darkest kind so the full atonement for our sin could be achieved.
In the place of no standing where waves crashed over the head and no relief was in sight, the Lord endured the cross FOR YOU. Some Christians don’t appreciate enough what this meant for their salvation. I know Christians are to be joyful, but too often Christ's suffering at Golgotha is brushed over. Please consider what it meant for the Lord to win salvation for you. There is too much of a casual attitude in our churches and in private lives and the accomplishment of Christ FOR YOU becomes a bit too matter-of-fact.
He was wounded for you! He suffered the deepest SEPARATION from the Father FOR YOU. Yet are you too blaze about it all? That is a shameful attitude. Do you meditate on the cross work of Christ and ponder each part of it to understand His love for you?
In our small fellowship we have the Lord’s Supper weekly as I think a study of Acts shows that to be correct. We make sure we dwell on the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, and to appreciate all that the Saviour did for each of us. I think that is why God wanted us to have the Lord’s Supper/Communion weekly so we would not become neglectful or forgetful.
{{1 Corinthians 11:28-30 “but let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself IF HE DOES NOT JUDGE THE BODY RIGHTLY. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep”}}. The AV says, “not discerning the Lord's body,” which I think is the best way to say it.
THE SECOND CRY FROM THE CROSS
We are almost compelled to consider for a moment the other cry given in a loud voice. Combine Matthew 27:50 with John 19:30 and we get the cry of, “It is finished!” shouted out over the land. What a cry of victory! Finished! - the pain, the suffering, the bearing of guilty sin and above all, the separation from the Father. Finished! - the full accomplishment of mankind’s redemption. Finished! - the reign of sin and death. What a glorious, triumphant proclamation that echoed through to the very boundaries of heaven and earth.
O the love that drew salvation’s plan!
O the grace that brought it down to man!
O the wondrous gulf that God did span, At Calvary.
Mercy there was great and grace was free,
Pardon there was multiplied to me.
There my burdened soul found liberty, At Calvary.
We will continue SEPARATION in the next message
